Is your Android device getting slow? Perhaps the memory is full even you keep deleting files. After using your Android tab or mobile for some time, it creates a lot of trash. Eventually, such an amount of trash makes the system lagging, freezing and slow down. Therefore, optimizing the device is important in order to improve the speed. Clearing cache or deleting unnecessary apps and files can help remove junk files and trash. So, how to empty trash on Android? Though some latest Android models have a recycle bin, it may not be enough to free memory space.
Don’t worry. Android has its own setup to find and get rid of these trashes easily. The following article presents tips and tricks to empty the trash on an Android phone and tablet.
What Is The Trash Files on Android?
In simple words, trash is a temporary folder containing files that have been deleted from the file manager but not permanently from the system. When the folder exists, memory gets full quickly and the device can’t run optimally.
There are different types of Android trash files. Mostly you have come across is the cache, which is created automatically by an application. These cache files can be from images, videos or files in any format.
In addition, other trashes on the Android device are unused folders and directories. Clearing them up can empty the trash and optimize the device to work smoothly.
How To Empty Trash On Android In 9 Ways?
Your Android device often holds unnecessary files. That, in turn, may take a lot of space and the phone can’t function properly. If you want to improve system performance, find unwanted files and remove them one by one.
Here are 9 quick ways to learn how to empty trash on Android and free up some space.
Clear Cached Data For Entire System
The first and foremost way is to clear all cached data for the entire Android system. It’s nothing but intermediatory data saved by the device to optimize efficiency. Even though it makes the system faster but takes huge memory and consequently slows down your phone.
But you can clear all the cache together by the following process,
- Open Settings on the Android.
- Scroll down to locate and open Storage & USB or Storage or RAM and storage space (the application name differs by your Android model).
- Tap Internal Storage, where you can find the total space and available space.
- Tap on Cached Data and wait for the system to finish calculating internal and external memory usage. Once it’s done, a confirmation popup will allow, tap Ok.
It’ll eventually clear up all cache memory and avail free space for the device. One problem is it makes the application loading longer.
Clear Cache For An Individual App
You can also delete cache for individual apps instead of the entire system. Even this solution is often recommended for emptying Android trash but can cause apps to load slower.
The cache is the marker of your usage for applications. Therefore, when you want to use an app, it opens quickly. However, the more apps you have on the device, the larger the cache files will be. In order to clear cache for a single app, here are the steps:
- Launch Settings on your device.
- Find and open Apps/ Apps & notifications.
- Locate the particular app for which you want to delete cached data and open it.
- Tap Internal Storage and select Clear cache.
This will clear the temporary files and remove junk saved in the phone for that app. You can apply the steps for apps that use a lot of data, like social media apps.
Clean Trash For WhatsApp
Some applications, such as WhatsApp, allow you to delete specific files from the storage and clear memory. It is an important communication medium that most people use these days.
At the same time, this app saves huge trash on the device. These trash files can be from media files sent, file status or backup files. Cleaning up WhatsApp trash files can increase your phone memory even up to 1GB.
There are two types of procedures to do it.
- Clean WhatsApp trash files from File Manager: Here are the steps,
- Open File Manager application on the device.
- Search and open the WhatsApp folder.
- Tap on the Media folder. You can see different folders like WhatsApp Documents, Video, Images, Animated Gifs, Stickers, Audio, Voice Notes, Wallpaper and Profile Photos. Open every folder, select the Sent folder and tap the delete button. If your system has a single Sent folder containing all the files you’ve sent so far, select it to delete.
- Go back and open the Databases folder. Select the files and delete them.
- Clean WhatsApp trash files from the app: Another way to clear trash files for WhatsApp on Android is as follows,
- Open the app from your device.
- Tap the three dots from the top right corner and select Settings.
- Tap and open Storage and data > Manage storage.
- Here you can review and delete items from the individual contacts with larger data. Every contact will show how much space they’ve taken.
- Select the contact and start selecting files (images, videos or others) to delete. Or also, you can tap on Select All from the above corner and tap delete.
Remove Trash From Gmail
It’s possible to clean trash on Android within the system application itself. For instance, you can try to clear up the trashes from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive etc.
If you take the example of Gmail, it accumulates a lot of trash. When you delete an email, it doesn’t get erased completely. Rather it is moved to the Trash folder and stays there for the next 30 days. To clear space in Gmail, you can visit and remove trash by following the steps below:
- Launch Gmail on Android.
- Tap on the hamburger menu from the top left corner. It will display various categories and folders. Select Trash.
- Press the three-dot icon from the top right corner.
- Select Empty trash from the menu.
- A confirmation box will appear. Tap Delete.
It will clear all the junk files from the Trash bin within Gmail.
Delete Downloaded Files
Most of the time, people download many unnecessary contents from the web and then forget about them. Even if you don’t use them, at some point, they take too much memory space. Consequently, you can’t download other new content.
So, to empty your trash, visit the Downloads folder and delete unnecessary files that you don’t need. Thus, you can clear up the storage.
Uninstall Unused Apps
Is your Android device contain too many unused apps? Maybe it’s time to get rid of them. Everyone has some apps on their phone that they don’t use anymore. If you’re among them, uninstall such apps in order to clear some internal space.
Let’s follow the simple process below:
- Go to Settings on Android.
- Open Apps/Apps & notification.
- Select the app you want to uninstall.
- Tap Uninstall.
And you’re done. Repeat the same process for other unnecessary apps and save some space. Additionally, you can also disable Android in-built apps to reduce loads on RAM.
Install Trash Cleaner
Another effective method to empty trash permanently on Android is using a trash cleaner application. It not only clears cache files but also removes any hidden trash files too.
However, do not download a heavy garbage cleaning app. Otherwise, you will end up increasing the RAM performance and reducing internal memory. It’s better to search for the lightest and most powerful Android trash removal application. Also, try not to select an app with root, else it may damage the phone.
So, how to clean up your Android? Here are some best trash file cleaning apps for Android users like Clean Master and CCleaner. Both applications have special features to delete trashes from your phone.
Use Micro SD Card
Is your smartphone’s memory not enough to store files? Then you can move and store all necessary files on a SD card. From useful documents to images, videos, apps, their data and other files, you can now save on the SD card.
Additionally, you can try to store or backup the contents in cloud storage too. In this way, the phone will be lag less and run smoothly.
Delete Duplicate Photos From Gallery
Smartphones with high-quality cameras are on-demand nowadays. It needs only a few seconds to take as many pictures as possible. However, these pictures accumulate larger storage and take unwanted space on your phone.
Furthermore, when you share photos through apps such as WhatsApp, they create a separate folder on the Gallery. If you don’t delete them timely, there can be piles of duplicate copies for every file you shared each time.
To empty trash on Android, start deleting duplicate photos from the Gallary you no longer need. Thus, it’ll prevent the phone from being cluttered. For this purpose, you may visit the Gallary and select pictures manually. But be careful, or otherwise, you may delete the wrong ones and can’t recover.
Conclusion
It’s not a big deal always when your smartphone gets slower. The problem often lies in the memory storage and by free up some space, it’s easy to fix the issue.
Moreover, the abundance of random files sometimes gets too many spaces and makes the phone laggy. By following any of the above-mentioned methods, you can empty Android trash quickly. Another key point is, clearing memory is important for system performance. Hence, to increase the speed, make sure you have enough free internal spaces on the phone.